Thursday, March 29, 2007

Storm Chasers and UFO Hunters

With a spate of tornado activity in the America Midwest March 29th, storm chasers and trackers were able to obtain much video of the transient funnels:

Storm chasers sometimes are notified of possible or actual tornados or they pursue weather patterns that might produce cyclonic winds. By so doing they are able to capture or witness the temporary storms, and document the destruction they often wreak.

UFO hunters, on the other hand, neither anticipate nor follow through immediately, as storm chasers do, when their phenomenon – UFOs – are sighted or are thought to make a reappearance in the vicinity of their original visual observation.

UFO hunters are thus only able to “investigate” the aftermath of a sighting, as news media does after a tornado has struck; both are rather impotent compared to what storm chasers do.

UFO hunters are relegated to debating inane issues, as one can note by going to UFO Updates (at virtuallystrange.net) and noting the protracted, senseless, and show-off discussion between Lan Fleming, Martin Shough, Brad Sparks, and James Smith about the Apollo 11 mission where something odd was seen by the astronauts.

The discussion is trying to verify whether the thing seen was a piece of mylar, a door panel, or something else, and the UFO hunters have brought everything to bear on the topic from gravity displacement to retrograde rocket thrusts. None has anything thing to do with UFOs as such, and the flamboyant debate is merely showcasing the esoteric knowledge the debaters have about NASA things flying in space.

(There is also a migraine-inducing “debate” going on between the aforementioned Shough and a woman called Cathy Reason. Both flex their scientific acumen, in public it seems, to show they are highly intellectual or wise. But the back-and-forth has nothing to do with UFOs and one wonders why it appears at UFO Updates and not in another venue or, more sensibly, a private domain.)

Storm chasers get the goods. UFO hunters are self-aggrandizing or ego-stricken. And by that measure, one can see why UFOs remain unexplained, and why sensible, intelligent folks eschew the topic.